Ideate Media SEO Web Marketing Blog (2)

Archive for September, 2010

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SEO Strategy: Shiny, Pretty Web Design for SEM

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

Part of having a website is being really proud of it. You might even think it’s beautiful, like a proud parent. The harsh reality is, most parents find their children beautiful. While we think children are precious, not every child is gorgeous, but unlike your website, people won’t tell you your child is ugly.

Although it may be optimized to a T, and your web marketing strategy, PPC accounts and SEO blogs all beautifully executed, if your website design is bad, it will impact your online business marketing potential severely.

Apart from keyword rich and optimized content, your website design needs three elements to convert a visitor into a potential buyer:

1.      Simplicity- Less is more. Your website design should not include heavy flash elements or cheesy animations, or anything reminiscent of a late-night infomercial. Keep it clean, simple and easy to navigate so that ANY visitor can figure out what your online business is all about quickly.

2.      Distinctive- Your website design has to truly represent your company’s image in order to cash in on that branding optimization. Think of big names like Target and Google. They have simple, yet extremely distinctive designs you can spot from a mile away. Your Internet marketing business strategy should involve designing a page with those elements in mind.

3.      Inspiring- Looking at your website should inspire the visitor to linger, look at items or website content for a long while, and in the best case scenario, buy your product! This last step is a combination of good search engine optimized content and a pretty, shiny website design that attracts your target audience.

To create a search engine marketing powerhouse that rises up the online rankings like a phoenix, research your target audience, analyze their online behavior and tailor your website design to what they will like.

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Search Advertising Strategy: Pared Down PPC (Part 3): Adjusting the Scale

Monday, September 20th, 2010

To tie this SEO blog back into the weight loss analogy, PPC search engine marketing strategy requires a lot of measuring and adjusting. Although some web marketing PPC technique may be initially very successful, it could plateau eventually. Unless it absolutely crashes, don’t waste the time spent in search engine optimizing by stopping whatever marketing plan you followed.

Successful PPC campaigns, just like any marketing or advertising (or weight loss) campaigns, require constant and systematic measuring, testing, web analytics and adjusting. Using proven strategies like A/B testing or multivariate testing ensures you are targeting the weakest part of your web performance and optimizing it back to a positive ROI.

Long-term maintenance of SEM success hinges on logically manipulating keyword phrases and exchanging the dud keywords for better keywording, optimizing website content to match your keyword bank, creating delicious ad copy and constantly checking for feedback from your target audience.

It takes time to grow a successful web marketing campaign, but once you’ve achieved the growth your online business wanted, the trick is to maintain the results through increasing your organic search with constant improvements to your Internet marketing. If you’ve reached your target goal, you can pat yourself on the back, and quickly adjust the scales to your next big SEM conquest while you’re still “hot.”

Just like dieting and weight loss, search engine optimization, website marketing and PPC have no “magic pill” to double your success rate. It takes good old-fashioned advertising, marketing, elbow grease and patience.

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Search Advertising Strategy: Pared Down PPC (Part 2): TIME

Monday, September 20th, 2010

Once you’ve set a reasonable and wishful goal with your PPC web marketing, it’s time to get down to the business of achieving these goals. A side note to the search engine marketing people, and the search engine optimizers out there: Your clients will be impatient for ROIs. Make sure there is a crystal clear line of communication about the fact that optimization and PPC results don’t happen overnight. The time factor should be a part of the RFP, in fact.

Anyway.

The next step in pared down PPC advertising is to make changes one at a time. If you start off by throwing out a ton of new keyword phrases, optimized ad copy, countless internet marketing blogs, and basically fire all of your missiles at once, there are NO reasonable metrics to figure out what worked, what flopped and what was pointless. You’ve also burned yourself out for no good reason.

Instead of throwing out the baby with the bathtub, make one or two measurable changes, tweak some optimization, maybe, run a few new PPC campaigns. Then wait for the web analytics results. Then wait some more, to see if those ROIs hold. After that you can make another small change. Figure out the big picture web marketing strategy, then break it down into bite-sized chunks to slowly feed into the website over an allotted period of time. It takes the guesswork out of the website marketing strategy and makes the process less stressful for everybody involved.

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Search Marketing Strategy: Pared Down PPC (Part 1)

Sunday, September 19th, 2010

The economy for the last few years has had many companies looking to trim the fat, cutting costs wherever possible without closing up the shop altogether. For some businesses it has meant layoffs, salary cuts, or hiring freezes and others have cut back on their crucial advertising spending costs.

In order to keep growing, most businesses need advertising. When it comes to Internet marketing, paid search is a little more helpful than organic search in stimulating revenue profits. If the budget is tight, though, throwing a ton of money, effort and time into overhauling PPC would be website marketing suicide.

So, for a slimmed-down web marketing budget (depending on which fiscal quarter is your worst-performing), you need to take the dieter’s approach to search engine marketing. Instead of having three huge meals in a day, dieters are given strategies like monitoring their calories and eating smaller portions in a regulated fashion. Web marketing strategy for PPC should operate the same way—small changes, and systematic evaluation of progress.

Just like with weight loss, you need to set the short- and long-term goals for your PPC marketing. Say your long-term goal was to double your sales. Great! Don’t expect it to happen in three months, though. If you set a short-term goal of a 10% increase in 3-6 months…that is feasible. It gives you enough time to implement some optimization, web strategy and then watch your web analytics to see how it’s impacting your web performance.

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SEM Strategy: A Plug for Social Media

Saturday, September 18th, 2010

It’s been a while since we talked about social media. As much as it is work, it’s actually one of the more fun aspects of search engine marketing. Social media tools aren’t just a great way to connect with your target audience, but they provide a free platform for your internet marketing efforts.

Whether you have an online business or a storefront, there are a few things you should do to promote your social media campaign, because it will gain you a loyal fan base who have a higher potential of being long-term and frequent clients.

The two things to do to help your business gain more organic search are easy marketing strategies. If you have physical business locations post visible “call-to-action” signs letting your clients know you are on the social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Put the logos on your business cards, too. For that matter, put it on your optimized blog in a very visible location and on your website. It’s a potential powerhouse of free website advertising, so put it everywhere!

From there, you can easily leapfrog to having incentivized promotions on your social media websites. You can put out great website content to encourage your fans to sign up for your e-mail newsletters, click on your promo codes and basically gauge the temperature of your core audience.

For online businesses, you can send out a “call to action” e-mail campaign to every new person that signs up with your e-mail to get similar results. The people joining your e-mail newsletters, Facebook and Twitter aren’t going to be random; they will be people who know and like your business who can help spread the word online. If they know you’re there, anyway.

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